


Quantum Immortality For Beginners

by cymaemesa



Category: Original Work
Genre: Death, Suicide Attempt, Torture, Violence, the misuse of quantum physics
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-01-10
Updated: 2021-01-10
Packaged: 2021-03-14 12:40:23
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 704
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28670901
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cymaemesa/pseuds/cymaemesa
Summary: We live in a quantum multiverse. Any event with a probability above zero happens somewhere. You’ve already learnt this from a textbook as a cute theory, but in about 500 years you’ll really understand it. Because one event which has probability above zero is you.
Kudos: 1





	Quantum Immortality For Beginners

People always want to ask about the exciting ones.

Jumping off a building, or into a piranha tank, or into the path of a speeding train. The action movie ones.

I guess they don’t really want to think about the slow ones, the ones that seem all too realistic. I want to try to write it all down though. The next generation will care about it after I die. Or at least, after I die from their perspective.

I’ve talked about the miracle drug which cured my Alzheimer’s when I was still a biologically plausible age. And the fluke combination of genes and drugs which extended that. But frankly I wasn’t paying enough attention in the first couple centuries to notice how exactly I managed a life twice as long as anyone else before anti-aging medication really became viable. That bit you're going to have to handle by yourself.

And if there's one thing I want you to take away from this it's that you can handle it and you will handle it. You have literally no choice.

So like I say, the TV people care about the time I got vaporized by lazers, or stranded in the Sahara, or incinerated in a crematorium. They tend to forget about the 99% of my “adventures” that just end in a misfire. At noon exactly the bomb you are strapped to is due to explode. Given as a certain fact (from your perspective) that at 1pm you’ll be alive, what’s the most likely outcome? 99 times out of a hundred the bomb doesn’t explode. I’ve written books on interesting ways of equipment jamming, explosives being a dud, and circuits frying. But those books don’t sell for much because they’re not exciting and those problems hardly ever happen to other people.

The ones that suck are the ones that don’t happen fast. There’s no probability magic you can do to make a slow acting poison not make you incredibly sick and nearly die. You know for sure you’ll live, but you know nothing about how ill it will make you. The only thing you can do is wait to find out what bizarre immunity or new medical treatment will stop it killing you. And then try to heal as much as possible before the next time.

Sorry, I'm not very good at starting things, continuing is more my deal these days. From the top:

We live in a quantum multiverse. Any event with a probability above zero happens somewhere. You’ve already learnt this from a textbook as a cute theory, but in about 500 years you’ll really understand it. Because one event which has probability above zero is you.

The probability of you getting cancer is pretty high, a random accident even higher, something more exotic is still plausible. From my point of view it’s pretty likely you’ll die soon. But there’s always a chance. And of course, when all possible events happen, and by definition you only experience the ones you’re still in, then your next experience will certainly be of yourself surviving with your continuity of identity intact.

Now pay attention to this bit because it's important. _No other probabilities change._ Whatever doesn't kill you proceeds according to traditional laws of physics. I've watched 50 movies about me by now and all of them get this wrong. The deus ex machina can't happen the night before I'm due to die, or even a minute before. I become aware of the deus ex machina at exactly the moment I would otherwise have stopped being conscious. A deus happening while I'm just living my life is astonishingly unlikely. Even someone as old as me only sees really spectacular things once or twice. If anyone else would lose and arm doing what you're doing you will also lose the arm. If they'd become very sick you will too. If they'd watch helpless as their lifeblood slowly pools around the charred corpses of everyone they've ever ...

Sorry. It's ... been a difficult century.

The short version is to try and make your imminent demise swift and make the runup painless. And if you ever have to kill someone, for god's sake kill the children too. Revenge is a terrible thing.

**Author's Note:**

> The first little section of a story I’d like to write. The full story would have ~5 POV characters, each of whom live a few thousand years then die in the middle of a thought in the first paragraph of the next POV.
> 
> Points to cover: becoming rich and famous by betting on your own non-death, how the immortals look to everyone else, how people don’t think it’ll happen to them until it does, the difference between surviving and getting away unharmed, how learning about the world makes your escapes more complicated and improbable, the nature of suicide in a QI world, how it interacts with big changes to the world (climate change happens, vacuum collapse doesn’t, AI foom has to happen a certain way).


End file.
